November - 2020

Journalist and author

Blog

In the 'hood

Nov 30, 2020

In the 'hood

The last of the Thanksgiving leftovers have been consumed. Wreaths and tinsel are filling the stores. It must be time to shop for holiday gifts – which, for Janeites, means discovering yet more weird Jane Austen stuff finding its way into the world. For instance: a pullover hoodie made of sustainable polyester and printed to look like a high-waisted, lace-trimmed Regency day dress. With a hood.* The Hoodie Custom Jane Austen Apparel – also available in sweatshirt, T-shirt, or

Sauce for the goose

Nov 26, 2020

Sauce for the goose

Like many of us in the Age of COVID, I’ll be hosting an unusually small Thanksgiving party tonight – just the four members of my immediate family. With only ourselves to please, we’re taking radical measures. We will not (gasp!) be serving turkey. Instead, we will be serving goose. (Wish me luck.) Naturally, this project evokes a key question: Are there geese in Jane Austen’s novels?* I’m happy to report that the answer is yes, in both Mansfield Park and Emma. For today’s pur

On this day in 1815. . .

Nov 23, 2020

On this day in 1815. . .

Fifty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Although Jane Austen was a professional writer who spent six years working with two different publishers, little of her surviving correspondence concerns business affairs; she left most such matters to her brother Henry. Among the handful of exceptions, however, is the letter Austen wrote to publisher John Murray exactly 205 years ago today (#126 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s corr

Mother of controversy

Nov 19, 2020

Mother of controversy

Some years ago – six? Ten? – I stumbled across a mention of an intriguing campaign to raise money for a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, to be erected in the north London neighborhood where she established a girls’ school and launched her writing career. Wollstonecraft, who died in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, is the mother of all of us who call ourselves feminists. She believed that women were rational beings, just as capable as men of self-determination and self-improvem

Kaleidescopic Austen

Nov 16, 2020

Kaleidescopic Austen

Over at the CW, someone has had a startlingly original idea: How about – get this! – modern-day updates of Jane Austen’s novels? OMG! Whoever imagined such a thing? My mind is blown! To be fair, although permutations of this concept have appeared in print roughly seven hundred billion times, and often enough in the movies as well, Austen updates are relatively thin on the ground in TV Land. (Except insofar as every Enemies to Lovers romcom is a version of Pride and Prejudice.

Another chance at completion

Nov 12, 2020

Another chance at completion

Less than a year ago, a rich person with excellent taste snapped up a complete set of Jane Austen first editions at a New York auction. If you want to take a shot at acquiring the same coveted Janeite prize, you have until 7 pm (Eastern) tonight. That’s when Skinner Auctioneers will close the bidding in its online auction of rare books, maps, and manuscripts. Among the items for sale is a set of first editions of all Austen’s novels – sixteen handsomely bound volumes once own

Hold the hot chocolate

Nov 9, 2020

Hold the hot chocolate

I’m afraid I have some very bad news. The pandemic has taken so much from us, and now it seems to have taken something more. Long ago, in the Before Times -- aka January -- the entertainment press reported that the Hallmark Channel was planning to add yet another Jane Austen-themed movie to this year’s Christmas schedule. Since 2016, the channel has brought us five deeply mediocre rom-coms claiming Austen associations: Unleashing Mr. Darcy; its sequel, Marrying Mr. Darcy; and

Good timing

Nov 5, 2020

Good timing

This weekend, time zones are friendly to Janeites with an appetite for online convening. On paper, it looks like you’d have to choose how to spend your Saturday: at either Austen Con, a one-day festival sponsored by a theater company in Melbourne, Australia, or “Pride, Prejudice and Zoom,” a one-day festival sponsored by the public library in Glendale, Arizona. But that’s the thing about time zones: Saturday in Australia is Friday in Arizona, and so the two events actually do

Cat person

Nov 2, 2020

Cat person

A cheerful story with a political angle—and a Jane Austen twist! On the eve of Election Day here in the stressed-out, locked-down, anxiety-ridden United States, it seems like an impossibility. But I’m happy to report that last month, the family of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, adopted a stray kitten and named him Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy – Darcy, for short. “His name was inspired by the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice,” the Coopers helpfully explain on t